


Haven

by simaetha



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Silmarils, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 15:59:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9131461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simaetha/pseuds/simaetha
Summary: The ship diminishes against the horizon, the sun rising to brighten the waves, the curve of Eärendil’s arm falling as his figure becomes smaller, turning away.Uinen’s mercy,Elwing thinks, and bites her tongue rather than pray.





	

Morning, the grey first dawn, brackish spray stinging her face. Elwing stands straight and tense, hugging her elbows, watching.

“Be good!” Eärendil says, laughing, picking Elros up and kissing him as the child giggles and squirms. “I’ll miss you so much! Be good, and brave, and look after your mother for me – “

Elrond, shy, clings to his leg, and Eärendil ruffles his hair, smiling down at him with forced brightness. His face is lit with eagerness, worry, the waves running high with the spring tide. _Ossë’s rising_ , the sailors called it, and cast flowers for Uinen upon the face of the sea.

To call the docks at Sirion a harbour would be generous. A channel found where between reedy islands the river flowed deep and wide into the sea, unfaced blocky stone laid down for a mooring-place. Those stones were dearly-bought, hewn from far-off mountains, and well-loved.

Amid coracles and fishing-boats, Vingilot floats like a ship out of song, the warm grain of its golden timbers sanded to perfection.

“Goodbye, my darlings – “

Eärendil picks Elrond up, and swings him, coaxing out a shriek and a smile, then looks up at Elwing and grins, self-consciously. She smiles, a slight movement of her mouth, but it makes him beam and come to her, a child hugged in each arm.

An awkward, juggled handover. Eärendil kisses her check; Elros starts crying, pre-emptively, setting off a whimper from his brother.

“I won’t be longer than I have to.”

“You never are.” She can hear the resigned note in her own voice, and resents herself for it.

“Love – “

She kisses him. Elrond starts to wail in earnest.

“Go,” she says. “I love you. Take care. Come back safely.” Another movement of her mouth, thinly approximated, but it makes him smile back.

He kisses the children, again, before he leaves. On deck, his gait smooths out, relaxes, a sailor’s rolling hips, orders called out; he can stand by the rear and wave at her, as the ship casts off and sets its prow into the sea-breeze.

“Say goodbye!” Elwing chirps, raising Elrond’s hand in hers to make him wave back, shifting Elros against her hip as he weeps.

Already her mind is ticking down the day’s tasks ahead, messengers, defences, eking out the last of the winter stores, bargaining with traders. Elrond keeps wailing, small hand sticky in her own, while Elros presses his face into her breast and sobs.

The ship diminishes against the horizon, the sun rising to brighten the waves, the curve of Eärendil’s arm falling as his figure becomes smaller, turning away.

_Uinen’s mercy_ , Elwing thinks, and bites her tongue rather than pray.

***

At her desk, her pen flows over the paper, tracing numbers and letters in smooth lines of black ink. Grey clouds weigh down the sky outside; she works in a prism of light, touching the limed walls and sedge-thatched roof with a wash of transient beauty.

“Mama – _mama_ – “

A small hand tugs at her skirts. Elwing closes off the curve of a tengwa – _for it is known to all what my lord husband seeks_ – and glances down at her son, wide eyes set in a round face, a childish moon floating in the silvered air.

“ _Yes_ , Elrond?”

A sucked thumb. He tries to climb into her lap; not knowing what else to do, she helps him up, and lets him peer at the jewel, his face bright with its illumination.

As infants, she used to hang the Silmaril over her children’s cradles every evening, before going to her own bed. Elrond had mouthed at it when teething, a pulse of light between his gums, as she paced, hoping it would ease him back to sleep.

“Mama – “

His face starts to crumple. She looks at him helplessly.

Footsteps hurrying at the doorway.

“Oh – lady, I’m sorry, he only got away for a moment – “

Meleth pants up, looking harried, her hair coming out of its braids; Elwing relinquishes her son, watching him sniffle as Meleth hefts him with the ease of long practice.

“Is he – “

“Oh, bless you, he’s fine,” Meleth says, “but if I don’t have him down I don’t know what that other one will be getting up to – “

Allowed to settle into his nurse’s arms, Elrond quietens, eyelashes fluttering in tiredness, starting to yawn. Elwing watches them go, the soft current of Meleth’s voice drifting away down the corridor, and turns back to her letter with a certain relief.

_Though we are all in straitened times, still if I might ask your aid in this –_

She works on, the sky outside dimming from grey into darkness, lapped at by the light that pools around her, a small space of brightness caged in by the night.

***

The breeze catches in Elwing’s hair. At her throat, the jewel shines, the Nauglamír a heavy weight of metal spilling over her collarbones.

“Here – “ the engineer calls out. “Just around this reed-bank – “

She splashes over, barefoot in the mud, skirts tied up above her knees. A bird calls, then a flock of waterfowl fly out from a stand of vegetation, passing overhead in a swift rush of wings.

Jewel-light strikes rainbows from the surface of the mere, standing water rippling from the movement of the air. Elwing follows, tentatively placing her feet among the reeds where the water gives way to land.

“You see?” the engineer calls. “If we can dredge this – ”

“You think we can?” Elwing asks. Laughter wells up inside her. She runs her hand through the greenery, slender stalks and thin leaves bending at her touch.

“We’ll need better pumps! But we can make them, if we have the metal – “

“If, if, if!” Elwing calls back. She begins to follow on the climb up the hill, reed and sedge yielding to fragrant grasses, the seeding heads catching at her dress as she goes. “You’re going to ask me for money next, right?”

“Well – “

Elwing laughs, the sound escaping her despite herself. At the hilltop, the engineer is standing, brow shaded with a hand, gazing out over the fens, her own mouth a bright curve of pleasure. Mud streaks her face.

“See,” she says. “If we dredge the channels there, and bank up the levees – look, you can see the pattern of it – we can fortify _here_ and _here_ , and then, lady, we’ll have no more fear of ambush – “

The Havens sprawl out around them, the clear waters of the Sirion a silver gleam amid a sea of reeds: the fens of Lisgardh, a maze of a thousand winding paths and waterways, shifting each year with the winter storms. Refugee-camp inches into city, tents and thatched longhouses set around the first stone buildings, their materials floated downstream only at effort and cost.

In Elwing’s mind, water flows through swift channels, vegetation clearing; terraces carve themselves out of the hills; towers rise above silvered moats, a harbour carves itself fit for fleets. A safe haven, for the survivors of Beleriand; a staging-place, if the hope for which she and her husband hardly dreamed –

“Yes,” Elwing says, grinning at her. “We’ll find the money somehow. Tell me what you need.”

***

"Lady, please - "

"You have _had_ your say," Elwing hisses, yanking her skirts away; she resists the urge to kick the messenger's hand where it grasped at their hem.

The messenger kneels, fingers still outstretched in the air, her expression a child's confronted with the unfairness of the world, only half-believing.

"Lady," she says, "surely - the jewel _belongs_ to my lords, it is Fëanor's lifework, you would not deny them - "

"I would deny them," Elwing snaps, "so much as a copper penny - so much as a reed plucked from the marsh - I give no hearing to the claims of _murderers_ \- "

Her guard makes eye contact. Elwing affects to ignore it, drawing herself up to her full height, as if the rush-strewn floor and smoking hearth had any grandeur to lend her; conscious of the jewel that makes her linen dress a royal mantle, her braided hair a fitting crown.

_A queen of no people_ , something says, darkly, inside her. _A queen of fugitives and refugees_. _What have you, but the Silmaril_ -

The messenger crumples. Her eyes are wet; the jewel-light shines in them, too, shadowed beneath the long hardships of Middle-earth, and the cruelties of exile.

"My lords' friendship - " she tries. "Surely, lady, you _need_ \- please, we don't want - "

"To hurt us?" Elwing asks, voice hard with anger. "Here are my terms. You will go from here and never force me to look upon you again. And then - and then - "

She thinks of Elros, a small warmth huddled against her hip; Elrond, climbing into her lap. _How will I say to you_ , she thinks, _that I offered even terms to your grandfather's killers_ -

"Eärendil may say otherwise, when he returns," she says, hating it. "As my lord husband decides. But I will never give you the jewel that we won with such hardship, not while my husband is at sea, not while my people have need for it - "

" _We_ need it!"

"Show her out," Elwing says, with a jerk of her chin to the guard; and steps away, walking to the window, ignoring the messenger's pleading as the guard forces her back.

_Not for anything they could give_ , she thinks, furious, and raises a hand to the Silmaril, clutching it to her breast.

The messenger's pleas fade. Elwing stands a little longer; and in the distance, the light plays brightly over the mud, its afterimage lingering as she turns away.


End file.
